Ever since Marley's ghost appeared to Scrooge in Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" back in 1843, the Season of Goodwill has become a traditional time for the telling and reading of ghost stories. What better time to settle down in the hearthside glow of a fire to read a spooky story or spine-tingling tale before retiring to bed? In Tom Slemen's Haunted Christmas you have a selection box of 27 seasonal spine-tingling stories to enjoy, perhaps to be indulged with a mince pie and a glass of sherry. These tinselly tales encompass the enigmatic and downright terrifying Red Fiend of Bold Street, as well as the case of a ghostly street urchin who returns from beyond the grave to help his dying mother in Victorian times. You will also read the heart-warming story of the poor child who sent a desperate note to Santa - and experienced a very surprising outcome, and you will also read about the small-time thief who decided to rob one of Liverpool's largest department stores dressed as Father Christmas - only to find his plans thwarted by two very creepy entities. Read of the girl who fell hopelessly in love with the ghost of a long-dead cavalier at Speke Hall, and of the adulterous doctor who encountered a headless apparition which made him see the light. There is also a weird story about a 13-year-old girl who takes on the terrifying ghosts who are trying to drive her and her mother out of their new house, and another unearthly tale concerns the awful curse a gypsy woman put on three men who mocked her appearance and laughed at her scruffy cats. These are just a few of the 27 tales about the creepy side of Christmastide...*Please note that with the exception of "The Santa Job" and "Hamilton Square's Headless Woman" all of the stories in this paperback have appeared in Tom Slemen's books before.

Have a Happy Haunted Christmas with these twelve previously-unpublished seasonal spinechillers from Tom Slemen, the unrivalled writer and researcher of all things supernatural.In the Twelve Ghosts of Christmas, you will even be chilled by the stories in the introduction to the book, never mind the devilish dozen true tales about eerie timeslips, gory premonitions, heart-stopping exorcisms, heartbreaking tales of lost love, graveyard tricksters, and sinister old hags. Read about the devil which tempted a bishop with pleasures of the flesh in The Missing Room, and of the titanic ominous force that turned a 3,000-ton ship upside down and sent its crew of 75 into Limbo...never to be seen again...Also, read about the bohemian sixties couple who gate-crashed a Satanist's party at Christmas and discovered what the main course was on the stomach-churning menu...Plus, dwell on the weird story of the uncanny red-suited phantom that terrorised a couple who bought a dream home in Normandy...he had bizarre plans for the future of their child...Just some of the weird but true stories in The Twelve Ghosts of Christmas!

The Wirral which Tom Slemen writes about in this fascinating book is a peninsula of ghosts, phantoms, spectres, doppelgangers, premonitions, reincarnations, astral voyages to another world and timeslips. The cases in Haunted Wirral confirm the old adage that truth really is stranger than fiction. Most ghost story books about Wirral include the same old weathered yarns about Mother Redcap's ghost and the spectres of smugglers, but the mysterious peninsula proved to be a stranger place than even Tom Slemen took it to be, with 51 tales weirder than anything found within the books of Stephen King, or Rod Serling's Twilight Zone. This edition includes a lost Wirral tale of Tom's that was recently found by the author concerning the "Thin Man" of Telegraph Road...

In plenty of time for the holidays, here is a gathering of thirty tales of ghosts, hauntings, and other paranormal happenings purported to have taken place on or around Christmas, or that are otherwise related to this holiday. By a long-time believer in the paranormal who in the introduction tells the story of her own Christmas ghost, Haunted Christmas includes stories such as: HAUNTED BETHLEHEM—Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, is famous for haunted locales such as the Hotel Bethlehem, the first house built in the town, in 1741. There, guests have come to expect visits from several spirits. Predictably, things heat up at Christmas—after all, this is Bethlehem. THE DEATH COACH OF CHRISTMAS—One Christmas Eve in Ireland many years ago, young Nora Mahoney was returning from the bogs when an invisible something suddenly rushed past her with the sound of grinding wheels and thundering horses' hooves. Had Nora encountered the “death coach” of Irish legend?

If you are looking for traditional, stereotyped ghost stories, this is not the book for you. You won't find any cliched, chain-rattling ghosts roaming castle ruins in Tom Slemen's Haunted Cheshire, nor will you encounter any of the regurgitated Cheshire legends which pad out so many books on supernatural folklore. Within this volume Tom Slemen has brought together a fascinating and thought-provoking collection of stories from his extensive files on the paranormal. During the research for his previous books on the ghosts of Merseyside, which resulted in the Haunted Liverpool series, he accumulated a wealth of material concerning the county of Cheshire. Most of the stories came from Cheshire people who heard Tom's spot on several local radio stations. Cheshire listeners bombarded Tom by telephone, letters, faxes and e-mail, with intriguing tales of ghostly hitchhikers, doppelgangers, curses, angels, time-warps, banshees, vampires, witches, warlocks, and spine-chilling premonitions. The response was phenomenal and quite unexpected. In Haunted Cheshire, you can read about the voodoo curse of the bus driver from Poynton, the Winsford vampire, the mummified lady from Hollinwood and many more chilling tales of ghosts, poltergeists and strange happenings from around the most haunted county in England.

Just some of the inexplicable things to be found within the pages of this paranormal casebook: mind-boggling timeslips...an eerie black bus with Hellbound passengers...a ghostly ship with a spectral crew of pirates that sails the night skies of the north-west on the lookout for kids who can't sleep...witches at large in Liverpool...a warning from the Christmas Angel of Death...the day the city froze in time...the television that allowed two girls to probe a neighbours extramarital affairs...rings of powers that lay beneath the land of north-west England...a possession from a creepy ventriloquist dummy...the sad tale of Mary Down the Grid and her connection to two unsolved child murders...an old school cap that allows the wearer to revisit his childhood with beneficial effects to his ailing health.... Just some of the strange but true stories in this collection from Liverpool's favourite author, and these tales, like all the others in Tom Slemen's Haunted Liverpool Casebook, have been carefully researched and verified by the author himself, and they will force the reader to challenge long-held beliefs and ideas about Liverpool, which crackles with supernatural activity.